This game sorely lacks the film's death-defying thrills. It fails to deliver enough bang for the big bucks that it costs. If you must play it, rent it. But if you don't want to waste your cash, avoid this Bat-astrophe forever.

The sound in this game is very distinctive. The music is an extremely successful blend of dark eeriness and circuslike fun. Overall, this is a neat game with challenging clues, darkly rich graphics, and movie-quality sound.

I could have baited you with a catchy opening sentence questioning whether Acclaim did justice to the Batman Forever license with this game. I could have kept you reading by throwing out both good and bad points of the game, saving the clincher for the last few paragraphs. I could have used flowery language, and rewarded the game for what it did right before revealing what went wrong. But I'm not going to lie to you or waste your time. The Batman Forever video game just plain sucks.

This is yet another Batman video game that doesn't give the villains a chance to shine. We're too busy watching the dynamic duo beat up bad guys that we never bother to care about the story. The sad fact is that there isn't much of a story; which is appropriate, because there isn't much of a game in Batman Forever.

Batman Forever does give you the opportunity to play as Batman or Robin, but Robin looks like he's wearing a cheap costume. Two people can play at once, but it's too awkward due to the size of the characters and the fact that you can't walk past each other (somebody's always in the way). And while the characters look sharp and colorful, the rest of the presentation is lousy. The backgrounds look boring and hand-drawn. Couldn't they have digitized some sets from the film? The music is not good, and the voice synthesis is horrendous. After listening to a clip, it'll take you a good 10 seconds to figure out what the heck the static you just heard was trying to say. The game's box has the gall to claim the game has "over 80 stages" and "over 125 moves". Even if that dubious claim were true, I doubt any gamer would have the patience to see them all. Batman Forever was widely heralded as the "worst game of 1995" by magazines of the time. In my book, it's the worst Genesis title ever.